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Keeping up with current scientific literature is a daunting task, considering that hundreds to thousands of papers are published each day. Now researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a computer program to help them evaluate and rank scientific articles in their field.

The researchers use a text-mining algorithm to prioritize research papers to read and include in their Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), a public database that manually curates and codes data from the scientific literature describing how environmental chemicals interact with genes to affect human health.

“Over 33,000 scientific papers have been published on heavy metal toxicity alone, going as far back as 1926,” explains Dr. Allan Peter Davis, a biocuration project manager for CTD at NC State who worked on the project and co-lead author of an article on the work. “We simply can’t read and code them all. And, with the help of this new algorithm, we don’t have to.”

To help select the most relevant papers for inclusion in the CTD, Thomas Wiegers, a research bioinformatician at NC State and the other co-lead author of the report, developed a sophisticated algorithm as part of a text-mining process. The application evaluates the text from thousands of papers and assigns a relevancy score to each document. “The score ranks the set of articles to help separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak,” Wiegers says.

But how good is the algorithm at determining the best papers? To test that, the researchers text-mined 15,000 articles and sent a representative sample to their team of biocurators to manually read and evaluate on their own, blind to the computer’s score. “The results were impressive,” Davis says. The biocurators concurred with the algorithm 85 percent of the time with respect to the highest-scored papers.

Using the algorithm to rank papers allowed biocurators to focus on the most relevant papers, increasing productivity by 27 percent and novel data content by 100 percent. “It’s a tremendous time-saving step,” Davis explains. “With this we can allocate our resources much more effectively by having the team focus on the most informative papers.”

Check out this guide that provides great visuals to help you learn some of the many tools Google provides to do searches. Did you know that you can search by type of content, including images, news, flights, applications, patents and more? Learn to search by reading level, use the dictionary tool, refine your query by time, region and language and much more!

Before one can think about multitasking, it is important to take into account that it is more than just practice. One has to be metacognitive in his or her approach to learning and paying attention to what is important. Know individual tendencies, but also know that a mind can be trained. Multitasking is not always the right approach, but it is often inevitable. Training one's mind to multitask effectively will only result in efficiency.

Can't the brain be trained in every task? Why not multitasking as well?

Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.

That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites. Landsat was a notable exception, built not for spycraft but for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.

Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. Over there are the central-pivot irrigation systems turning the sands of Saudi Arabia into an agricultural breadbasket — a surreal green-on-brown polka-dot pattern in the desert. Elsewhere is the bad news: the high-speed retreat of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska; the West Virginia Mountains decapitated by the mining industry; the denuded forests of the Amazon, cut to stubble by loggers.

Incredible images showing not only deforestation, but increase in urban sprawl & vanishing glaciers. 

Wow!

Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.

That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites. Landsat was a notable exception, built not for spycraft but for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.

Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. Over there are the central-pivot irrigation systems turning the sands of Saudi Arabia into an agricultural breadbasket — a surreal green-on-brown polka-dot pattern in the desert. Elsewhere is the bad news: the high-speed retreat of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska; the West Virginia Mountains decapitated by the mining industry; the denuded forests of the Amazon, cut to stubble by loggers.

Incredible images showing not only deforestation, but increase in urban sprawl & vanishing glaciers. 

Wow!

Role of the brain

Because the brain operates in a completely different way than traditional computing systems, the first step was to try to make sense of how the brain integrates and responds to data. To do so, Venayagamoorthy enlisted the expertise of neuroscientist Steve Potter, Ph.D., director of the Laboratory for NeuroEngineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Potter recently pioneered a new method for understanding how the brain integrates and responds to information at the network level. The technique involves growing neurons in a dish containing a grid of electrodes that can both stimulate and record activity. The electrodes connect the neuronal network to a computer, allowing two-way communication between the living and the electronic components.

Potter’s group has had success with this approach in the past, having shown that living neuronal networks can be made to control computer-simulated animals and simple robots. In the current project, the network is trained to recognize and respond to voltage and speed signals from Venayagamoorthy’s power grid simulation.

“The goal is to translate the physical and functional changes that occur as living neuronal network learns into mathematical equations, ultimately leading to a more brain-like intelligent control system,” says Venayagamoorthy.

The purpose is to develop brain-inspired computer code. The investigators have successfully “taught” a living neuronal network how to respond to complex data, and have incorporated these findings into simulated versions called bio-inspired artificial neural networks (BIANNS). They are currently using the new and improved BIANNS to control synchronous generators connected to a power system.

Venayagamoorthy and his team hope that this work will pave the way for smarter control of our future power grid.

This project was supported by NSF’s Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI).

Beth Dichter's insight:

This is a great interactive model of critical thinking. One circle has 8 elements of thought:
* Purpose

* Question at issue

* Information

* Interpretation and influence

* Concepts

* Assumptions

* Implications and Consequences

* Point of View

As you role over and selelct an element of thought you are hown additional information about the element. For example, if you were to select Point of View  you would be prompted to understand your point of view and provided with questions to further your thinking. In addition there are also prompts for intellectual standards to consider. The intellectual standards include: clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance, and fairness. In each of these area there is a brief definition as well a three additional questions to consider. There is also one choice (more) that provides you with additional standards you might want to consider and suggests that you think of your own.

I'm thinking this is a pretty complicated model given that many of our very best critical thinking is done within the space of a blink!  However, it's useful to be able to break it down and explain it for undergraduates for whom universities have great expectations in criticial thinking but don't really explain how they know what it is when they see it.  And, sadly, in introductory courses too often professors don't expect critical thinking of their students - sticking too close to recall or lower levels of application thinking for their expectations of student performance.